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Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive?
dhclab49 asks: "Recently, I wrote a data-driven web application for a customer, and when it came time for them to select a hosting company, what I found was that most hosting companies charge a LOT for disk space. Most of them have accounts for $10-$30 per month, a bit more if you add in a database account. However, they almost all limit you to around 250MB of disk space, with extra space costing like $1/month per additional MB of storage. The app I wrote manages the customer's workflow and is meant to allow them to generate PDF documents and store them online, so I really need a few gigs. In an era where hard disks cost about a buck a gig and are getting cheaper by the day, how can hosting companies charge $1000 per gigabyte per YEAR?! And are there any alternatives out there for hosting a data-driven website at a reliable datacenter with a few GB of space for under $500/mo?"
Because they CAN, that's why.
:)
Your solution: Co-Location! Mmm, co-looooo...the very word makes my tummy quiver.
Also note - if you're storing files that big, you're probably, oh, I don't know, transferring them, too - so watch out for those bandwidth fees - they're a killer!
disk space for gigabytes worth of data is a relative non-issue --- it's possible for home machines to hold a terrabyte or more worth of data. the question is, how much does it cost to back that data up? my dad sells storage area networks and tape backup systems and i can tell you that there's a lot more than just having some monkey cpio / tar the filesytem --- there's a lot of potentially very expensive hardware and software involved for full backup stuff. just my $0.02
Anyone who has or currently works in the hosting industry knows there is a lot more to the cost of operations than just HD space. Of course, when you use the word, "Datacenter" are you then talking about high-speed SCSI drives in some sort of RAID array? With that, even HD's can get expensive. Colo is the way to go, just setup a cheap server with big IDE drives and maybe an ARAID or something and get someone to stick it in their room for $200 a month.
If you put up 2-3 megs of html, you aren't going to cost the company lots of bandwidth. Well, you would need a LOT of page impressions to come up to anything substancial.
However, if you're allowed to put up 200MB of the latest Family Guy episodes, the isos of your latest homebrew linux distro or whatever, you're likely to be costing that company a pretty penny in the near future.
Naturally, this is all compounded by the threat of a slashdotting or similar.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I have a server with 60GB's of raid 0 for 30 bucks a month in a reliable datacenter. They give me 4U's of space for the server too. The place I'm with will even build a server for you.
I highly recommend them as one night something went wrong with a lilo update and their tech support ended up building me a new lilo.conf file with echo. When I phoned them they already new that my server had failed to properly restart so they gave it another restart and when it failed to restart they awaited my call for instructions.
http://www.tera-byte.com/colo.html
I think it has a lot to do with bandwidth. Although harddrive space isn't expensive, bandwidth is. Hosting services operate on the premise that the more space a site takes, the more things there are to look at (not an entirely stupid assumption) and no bigger sites use more bandwidth. The problem is that some sites (like yours) are big because they are archives and won't consume as much bandwidth as a "normal" site of the same size.
I'd try looking for a hosting service that will let you pay by bandwidth rather disk space. Or look into hosting the site yourself.
Contrary to popular belief, disk space can be expensive and fast, big disks are really expensive. While IDE family of hard drives are very, very cheap and quite large, they aren't very good for high volume server applications. Instead of going to pricewatch, go to dell.com and price out a big net appliance disk with a fast interconnect. Hmm, a quick check shows a dell 770N net attached storage box at $14K with only 800 Gigs (raw). Hosting (hosing?) many domains on a single computer is going to require really fast disk, not just a single 5400 rpm drive....
-Sean
You're used to 'home storage' prices. Look at pricewatch, find a good brand of EIDE, and just get it.
They're looking at 'enterprise storage'. We have 11 tera of raw disk on an EMC. It cost $2 million. The useable storage out of it is around 3-4 tera, after counting mirroring, and third mirror break off for backups, etc, etc, etc.
These drives use MCA (iirc) interconnects to a disk backplane, and fiber channel interconnects between disk boards and the front end san switch. The computers are fiber connected into the san switch as well, and the JNI cards (client end of a SAN connection) for this are NOT cheep.
To Online storage companies, downtime costs serious money. They can't afford the downtime. That's why their storage costs real money. Then they pass it on to you.
If you need real amounts of data, you don't want a hosting service, you want a CoLo service (They give you rack space, and an internet connection. You provide the box). If you want, you can put a desktop with 2x140 gb drives, and you'll get what reliability you can out of it (most IDE drives are warrenteed for 1 year for a reason). If you want the thing to last, get a server class, rack mountable server from (dell|compaq|ibm|penguin computers). You'll be happy you did. Mirror the drives (preferably in hardware) so you can loose a disk without killing your service.
Zapman
Because disks are cheap but backups, power, controllers, arrays, racks, floor space and *technicians* are all still expensive. Be very wary of any company that offers "cheap" disk storage; they're almost certainly inexperienced and/or untrustworthy. $1000/gig sounds about right.
It's about things like backups, raid, and power. I host my own box on the net, I got 100 gigs, but I pay all the bills and do the backups myself. There are few things that a hosting company can charge for, bandwidth is uniform and like water. CPU speed is a nebuous factor (not the net nobody cares how fast it sceams). On the other hand Disk space is measurable and has some overhead. A gig in a home system is cheap, A gig in a NetApp with daily backups isn't.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I have noticed the same thing - cost for disk space seems way out of line but the answer in part is that it costs that much because people are willing to pay for it.
But don't assume that raw disk cost is the most important factor. ISPs generally host lots of sites on a bunch of pretty generic standardized boxes.
Here are some other factors that will drive the cost up:
Good hardware: RAID/hot-swap/SCSI is going to cost a lot more than a discount IDE drive.
Maintenance: It's not just the cost of a single drive - it's the parts and labor cost of replacing failed units as well.
Backups: Whatever you store they have to backup so they have to consider all the costs associated with data protection.
Machine capacity: If they have sized their standard machine to host, say, 200 sites and partitioned out the data space accordingly then you can think of someone who uses 10 times the normal data quota as really using up 10 users worth of capacity on that machine as a whole. Where there are bandwidth guarantees a similar situation exists.
I'm sure there are other considerations as well but considering the price pressure on ISPs these days I'm sure that you could find plenty who would offer cheap disk space to get you as a customer if they would make money doing it.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
A friend of mine and I are starting up a company called PDXcolo.net. We're using User-mode Linux to host virtual machines, where you get your own copy of the distro, your own RAM, etc., on a shared machine. You get full root access to the machine, and can (within reason) do anything you want with it. Our base packge (for $20/mo) includes ~64MHz of proc, 64MB of RAM, 2GB of disk (your distro is *not* part of that unless you make significant changes), and 10GB of transfer per month. Additional disk is only $1/GB/mo, and bandwidth is $1.50/GB. 'Machines' are available in power-of-two multiples of that basic config, so far up to 8 'slots', or 512/512/16/80. More can be arranged special-case.
If you're interested, email beta@pdxcolo.net and we'll get you set up soon (merchant account troubles are our main slowdown right now) on our initial machine. That box has 2x 200GB disks in a RAID-1 config. We're planning on doing something on the order of a 3x RAID-5 arrangement on all new hardware, and/or a significant SAN setup.
Our machines are located in a well-respected datacenter in downtown Portland (hence 'pdx', our airport code), and as we build up our infrastructure daily backups will be available over and above the RAID on the hosts. We've got one circuit so far that we've pushed to 25Mbps, an d will be adding more circuits as we get our first customers.
So, if what you're doing doesn't require mega processor or RAM usage, but lots of disk, you might consider using one of our virtual machines to host your app.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
For $100/month you can get a box at Rackshack with 60GB of hard disk space all to yourself. Plus 400GB/month transfers which should be more than enough. Granted, the $100 deal is only for a Celeron 1.3GHz box, but faster machines are available for a little more money.
I've got one of those servers with them now, and their support is really quite good, and the connection has been rock-solid.
1) Buy hard disks at $1/gig
2) Rent disk space online at $1000/gig/year
3) Profit!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
You'll ruin EVERYTHING!
The reason it's like that is because every time someone notices, they start their own hosting company, fuckwit!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
heh, ever thought of reading the ads on slashdot? They're right there across the top of the screen!
well some of the advertizers, ServerBeach comes to mind, will give you a complete machine, with a 60 gig drive for 99 dollars per month (450 gb transfer)
this machine can also be used for things like mail, ftp, or whatever
99x12=1188/60=19.8 per gb per year
and that's not just disk space
Buttsex.
I'd like to see some kind of online comparison of the major providers' services.
-cost/month
-control panel?
-MBs
-monthly traffic
-how many subdomains
-how many email/aliases
-can I do stuff.example.com vs. example.com/stuff
Has anyone tried them? Any thougths.... good, bad, indifferent?
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The web hosting market space leaves little room for profitability in default configurations. The problem is, you HAVE to get a low price or people will ignore you. I've seen absurd offerings like 50 gig of bandwidth and 300 meg of space for $5 per month. There's no way this is cost effective...50 gigabytes of bandwidth is the equivalent of 154 kbit per second. Get 7 people actually pushing at that level and you'd have the equivalent of a T1's bandwidth for $35 in revue, which at least around here is a $565 loss.
So you oversell. Of course you oversell...chances are 95% of your users will never hit that level. If they do, you make sure your service agreement has a "drop you at any time we like" clause. No problem. It's sleazy, but people never pay their bandwidth bills...shit, i owe my old co loc something like $500 and they never even bothered to send a bill, they knew I wouldn't pay it.
Disk space is another issue entirely. People will definitely hit their disk space limit, so you can't oversell it. And the people doing it will be content creators -- just the people likely to pay for additional play. Charge them up the ass, offer then your "second tier" service, and you've got a single client stuck on your service AND paying you more money for roughly the same support costs.
Of course, you *COULD* just buck the whole thing and charge what you like, or a percentage above what things actually cost you and your company. You can do sophisticated math on how much your time is worth vs. how much time you spend doing tasks and assign a value based on that. You're not going to have much success, but if you have quality service you'll get a few people anyway.
Hey freaks: now you're ju